Pakistan Apparel Forum on Monday criticised the spinning sector's demand for placing regulatory duty (RD) on yarn import and feared the proposal if implemented would further scale down value-added textile exports. In April 2014, Chairman PAF, Javed Bilwani said that Economic Co-ordination Committee had imposed a five percent duty on import of cotton yarn, despite being 'unethical' and 'unjustified', the government failed to reap advantages from the duty. "What advantage was gained with the imposition of a 5 percent duty on import of cotton yarn," he asked.
The country textile exports nose-dived in the current scenario, he said and termed and fresh proposal for imposition or increase in a regulatory duty on import of cotton yarn 'unjustified'. He said that any such move would turn the manufacturing and exports of apparel textile unfeasible.
The move, he worried, will also lose Pakistan's competitiveness in term of cost of production in comparison with other regional and other textile exporting countries on the global markets. "There was absolutely no justification in imposing duty on import of cotton yarn because globally there has never been any imposition of duty on import of raw material," he strongly reacted, saying that only 'inefficient' spinning mills were showing financial losses as a large number of mills balance sheet showed 'huge' profits.
He proposed to the government to follow Bangladesh textile model to square cost of production with Dhaka to enable the country's apparel sector competitive. Bilwani urged the government to take any proposed decision first to National Tariff Commission to avoid troubles with the duty imposition that the value-added textile sector would suffer.
"If the government considers above recommendations, we could at least convert our one million cotton bales at $4 billion per million cotton bales from the present $1.17 billion as Bangladesh converts one million cotton bales to $6 billion. This would greatly benefit the export of textile export," he added.